Dairy

This is an excellent technique for a dinner party or any occasion when you want to spend time with your guests instead of standing over the stove. The risotto will be firm and toothsome, but you can treat this as traditional risotto and finish it with a dollop of extra virgin olive oil or butter and some freshly grated cheese for added creaminess. It’s a nice change of pace served with sautéed chicken with a quick pan sauce of white wine and fresh herbs, crispy skate in brown butter with capers, or a garlicky stir-fry of seasonal vegetables.

Cacio pepe literally translates as “cheese and pepper.” It is a classic Italian pasta dish that centers on the flavors of grated cheese and freshly ground black pepper. The simplest versions we have seen are made with abundant cheese and pepper, melted and moistened only with the cooking water. More indulgent recipes add olive oil or butter as we do below. Most recipes call for Pecorino Romano, a hard sheep’s-milk cheese, although Parmigiano Romano also crops up here and there. In our version the roasted pasta adds a deeper, more savory flavor to the finished dish. It is simple to make but it’s important to get the balance right so that your pasta is silky and flavorful. It’s the perfect meal for when the pantry is almost bare but the body needs something delicious to satisfy it.

Buttermilk biscuits are a classic recipe that combines steam leavening and chemical leaveners to optimum effect. They are easily stirred together and rise dramatically in the oven. Slathered with cold butter and drizzled with cane syrup or honey, fresh biscuits are an easy and indulgent way to get your day started. Actually, they are pretty wonderful at any time of day. Buttermilk biscuits on the dinner table bring smiles to people’s faces, and split open and covered with fresh fruit and sweet cream, they are a treat to remember.

This flatbread is a riff on the classic focaccia from Recco, Italy. Unlike the traditional yeasted focaccia, this bread is two layers of unleavened dough separated by cheese. The dough is made by first adding the oil to the flour, mixing it in to coat the starch, and then adding the water. This method keeps the flour from clumping and facilitates a well-blended dough. This flatbread is a great way to start a dinner party with everyone congregating in and around the kitchen, cocktails in hand as the flatbread comes out of the oven. It’s a graphic illustration of the power of steam leavening. After the bread is cut it deflates into a truly flat bread. It’s beautiful and delicious, a sure conversation piece as people relax and settle in for the evening.

These crackers combine the sweet flavor of onions in the dough with the taste of Old Bay, the ubiquitous seafood seasoning. The crackers are a great recipe for children because the dough is flavorful and easy to work with, and kids can have fun at the end breaking the large pieces into bite-size bits. They go well with cheese, seafood dips and salads, steak tartare, hummus, baba ghanoush, and of course, good butter.

This is the best fried chicken ever. The smoke permeates the meat, seasoning it from the inside out. Combined with the crunchy exterior and juicy meat, it is revelatory. Just remember to let it rest before eating. It’s almost impossible not to dive in immediately, but when the chicken is too hot you can’t fully appreciate the texture and flavors. We use rice bran oil for frying because it has a high smoke point and a clean, neutral flavor, which means that fried foods tend to cook evenly without burning or absorbing any heavy flavors from the oil. It is pressed from the hull of the rice grain and is high in antioxidants. It costs about the same as good olive oil, and its slightly sweet, nutty flavor is good for baking, cold marinades, and dressings. Once you try it, it will be hard to go back to canola. You can substitute whatever your favorite chicken parts are for the thighs. If you use breasts we suggest cutting them in half crosswise for the proper coating-to-meat ratio. Whatever you do, just make sure you try this technique. It’s a little bit of work for a big reward.

This recipe is a play on the ubiquitous smoked salmon with cream cheese and a bagel. It was one of our favorite lazy Sunday breakfasts when we were living in New York. Once we moved away from the city, we found that we didn’t always have access to great bagels or smoked salmon. We needed to find a good alternative that was readily available. “Everything” bagels—which typically contain onion, garlic, and several seeds—are our favorite, characterized by their crunchy coating of various seasonings. So we decided to use that flavor profile for cured salmon fillets and cream cheese that we could easily make at home.

No large sign—just a plaque next to a simple security button—tells you that this is the gate to a simple building housing the Cercle Bernard Lazare. The center was named in memory of Bernard Lazare, who, during the Dreyfus Affair, was a left-wing literary critic, anarchist, Zionist, and newspaper editor. He bravely defended Captain Dreyfus, and won over Jewish artists such as Camille Pissarro to the cause. The center sponsors Jewish cultural events, choosing not to advertise its location because of previous anti-Semitic attacks. When I entered this very bare-boned building, it was full of activity. Jeanine Franier came out of the kitchen to greet me, bringing along a waft of the delicious aromas from her oven. Every Thursday, before the center’s weekly lectures, she cooks. She believes that people listen to lecturers more attentively if they know a little food will be served. Regardless of what her staff cooks as a main course, this cheesecake from her Polish past is served for dessert. It has become an integral part of the lectures, and was published in the Cercle’s cookbook, called Quand Nos Boubés Font la Cuisine (When Grandmothers Cook), which she wrote in part as a fund-raising device, in part as a way of preserving a culture that is rapidly being forgotten. The cheesecake reminds me of many I ate all over France, including the one at Finkelsztajn’s Delicatessen in Paris. It tastes clearly of its delicate component parts, unlike the creamy block of cheesecake with a graham-cracker crust we find in the United States.

The earliest known French potato dish is pommes de terre dauphinoises, which originated in Switzerland in 1600. I tasted this divine dish of scalloped potato, cheese, and milk, a specialty of the region near Annecy, at the home of Ruth Moos (see page 3), who made it as an evening dairy meal served with a salad and vegetables. Instead of covering the potatoes and the cheese with the traditional beef bouillon or broth, Ruth makes it kosher style using only cream or milk.

In the movie Ratatouille, the rat made a tian of eggplant and other vegetables, set vertically in a baking dish. A similar dish came down in the family of Gérard Monteux, whose ancestors have made this dish since tomatoes came to Provence. The keys to the recipe are to make sure that the tomatoes and onions are of the same diameter as the eggplant, and to use a square or rectangular baking dish. I have made it in a French tian, but you can use any pan about 9 inches square. Good any time of year, it is spectacular in the summer, when tomatoes are at their best.

When I was visiting the Luberon, we wound our way up to the top of the hillop village of Bonnieux and stopped at the Musée de la Boulangerie. There, in an ancient house, the history of bread and baking is traced. Among the ancient pots and pans were shallow unglazed earthenware bowls called at the museum “tians,” which were and are used much like Dutch ovens for cooking vegetables in the embers of a fire. In the south of France, there are many recipes for tians, layered casseroles of vegetables sometimes mixed with eggs and sometimes with rice and served in the Jewish way as a main course for a dairy meal. In this recipe, a nice substitute for the spinach would be Swiss chard, also a vegetable used since antiquity.

Like many French Jews today, Jocelyne Akoun (see page 28) is a cultural amalgam. She grew up in a Turkish-Spanish family that lived in Algeria for many years before immigrating to Marseille. This dish could as easily be Provençal as Algerian, the tomatoes having been added when they came to the Old World with the discovery of the Americas.

Eggplant came to Europe from India sometime around the eighth century, possibly with seeds carried by Jewish merchants. Often called the Jew’s apple, the eggplant has played an important role in Jewish cooking since early times. The old recipes found in the Vaucluse, such as the Ladino almodrote de berenjenas, are present today throughout the Sephardic world in the Mediterranean. Although the eggplant is sometimes sautéed in this dish, I prefer roasting it over a fire to bring out the smoky flavor, and then chopping it into chunks with two knives, a technique I learned from Sephardic French cooks. You can also roast the eggplant in an oven then pulse it in the food processor. With the increasing number of vegetarians even in France, this dish is becoming very popular, “modernized” with pesto, crème fraîche, or anchovies, or covered with tomato sauce. A purist, I like to serve it the old way—simply, with a salad.

Mathias Laurent, the cook in his family, makes this simple dish for his children in his sleek kitchen. With leftovers, he adds lots of Comté cheese. You can use any grated cheese you like.

People often ask me what kind of latkes were eaten before potatoes came to the Old World from the New. This onion pancake gives us a taste of that past. Buckwheat, called farine aux Sarrazins or blé noir in French, is used for this recipe. Although rendered goose fat was traditionally the oil used in Alsace and elsewhere in Europe, oils made from safflower, walnuts, and other nuts and seeds were also used, probably pressed by the farmers who brought them to markets where they were sold. The recipe, although attributed as Alsatian in one cookbook, is clearly from eastern Europe, as the word “gretchenes” means buckwheat in Polish.

When I ate lunch at the elaborate Hôtel Daniel, located between the Champs-Élysées and the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, I felt as though I were transported to a salon in Proust’s Paris. I met the young chef, Denis Fetisson, who brought out an array of dishes. Among them was this wonderful Roquefort soufflé, which Denis serves to vegetarians and to his kosher clientele. It is easy and elegant and makes a wonderful meal when served with a large salad.

If anything is typical of Alsace, it is tarte flambée, a pizzalike flat bread covered with runny white and tangy cheese (a thin mixture of farmer’s cheese, crème fraîche, heavy cream, and fromage blanc or Gruyère, depending on your preference) and a sprinkling of diced onions and lardons. Dating back hundreds of years, tarte flambée is served everywhere in Alsace, with connoisseurs arguing about their favorite versions. In the old days, the farmers would take leftover bread dough, roll it out paperthin, spread some heavy cream mixed with egg over it, scatter some lardons or ham and onions on top, put it in a hot, wood-burning oven, and—voilà!—dinner was ready. The tradition still stands today, and tarte flambée is particularly enjoyed accompanied by a green salad as a simple Sunday night dinner. At the end of a late Sunday afternoon in April, I was driving Yves Alexandre, a traveling salesman who loves to cook, near fields resplendent with signs of spring—white asparagus and rhubarb, and yellow rapeseed flowers (more commonly known in the United States as the flowers that produce canola). We stopped at Le Marronnier, a charming winstub in Stutzheim, a little town about ten miles from Strasbourg. It was here that I tasted my first tarte flambée. Most of the patrons were seated at outdoor tables in the cobblestoned courtyard with wisteria climbing over the brick walls. A marronnier, a sprawling chestnut tree, stood smack in the center of the patio. “You have to eat the tart hot,” Yves told me as tarts were being rushed to tables near us. The two Mauritian tarte-flambée bakers make a few hundred every Sunday, with a topping of farmer’s cheese and crème fraîche. This Jewish version, with leftover challah dough as a base, of course omits the ham or bacon. At Passover, Yves told me, some Alsatian Jews use matzo for their Sunday night tarte flambée.

After getting reacquainted over a game of Ping-Pong with Caroline and Philippe Moos, cousins I had not seen in many years, I joined them for a dairy dinner with four of their nine children in their house in Aix-les-Bains (see page 212). The meal was delicious, consisting of a vegetable soup, an apricot tart for dessert, and this Savoyard tomato-and-cheese quiche as the main course. This is one of those great recipes in which you can substitute almost any leftover cheese you may have in your refrigerator.

Sometimes I discover dishes that are perfectly in accord with the laws of kashrut in unlikely places. Walking around a neighborhood market in Paris one day, I wandered into a small delicatessen shop called Partout et Tout Mieux, which translates as “Everywhere and Better.” An alluring cherry-tomato-and-basil tart sitting invitingly in the window caught my eye. So I went in and complimented Marie Le Bechennec, the shop owner, on the lovely-looking quiche. I explained that I was writing a cookbook on Jewish food in France and this crustless quiche would fit perfectly into a dairy meal. She replied that she and her husband, Serge, are from Brittany and have many Jewish customers. During the war, her father-in-law was taken prisoner by the Germans because he had hidden Jews who were being mistreated. She paused for a moment. “You know, I think my son is tolerant because he heard this strong voice growing up. That is the only way that tolerance will be translated from generation to generation.” Mary calls this dish a quiche clafoutis. In French cuisine, a quiche is a custard of eggs and milk or cream baked in a pastry crust. And clafoutis comes from the verb clafir, meaning “to fill up” or “puff up.” In this case, the bright-red tomatoes and green basil puff up to the top of the custard. I vary this dish by adding Parmesan and goat cheese; in winter try sautéed mushrooms or one package of frozen spinach and a handful of chives.

When I ate dinner at the Home of Nathalie Berrebi, a Frenchwoman living in Geneva, she served this savory quick bread warm and sliced thin, as a first course for a dinner attended by lots of children and adults. For the main course, Nathalie prepared rouget (red mullet) with an eggplant tapenade on top, something all the children loved. The entire dinner was delicious, but I especially liked that savory bread with the unexpected flavor combination of goat cheese, apricots, and fresh mint. Now I often make this quick bread for brunch or lunch and serve it with a green salad.